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Bill Miller, the famed fund manager who beat the S&P 500 for 15 consecutive years, hasn't been heard from as much lately. The performance of his Legg Mason Value Trust struggled during the financial crisis, but it has bounced back nicely, outperforming the S&P 500 by 25.6 percentage points (87.5% to 61.9%) since the March 2009 lows. The performance issues during the last bear market seem to have lowered the number of Miller followers, but we still feel it's worthwhile to track what he's holding.
As of the end of Q1 2010, Miller's biggest holding in his Value Trust was AES Corp (AES). Based on the stock's current price, AES would represent 6.8% of the portfolio. Unfortunately for Miller, his biggest holding is also the holding that is down the most year to date. Aflac (AFL), Capital One (COF), IBM, and Aetna (AET) round out the top five biggest holdings. Miller continues to hold a lot of Financial and Technology stocks. He has positions in Bank of America (BAC), Wells Fargo (WFC), Goldman Sachs (GS), American Express (AXP), and Citigroup (C). The big tech names held along with IBM include Cisco (CSCO), Texas Instruments (TXN), eBay (EBAY), Hewlett Packard (HPQ), Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT), and Google (GOOG). The one big tech name missing from the portfolio that would have been a big boost to performance this year is Apple (AAPL).
Miller lost his ass on the way down due to the financials but he held on to them and they bounced back. Thus from the bottom he looks ok but before that, ugh. So, highlighting him like this is nothing more than showing a random event not great management. His fund looked at on a dollar basis vs the annual percentage performance is awful as so much money came in, and was lost, at the peak of the media gushing over him that overall for his tenure people lost more money than they made. My guess is that hubris got the best of him.
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